The Good Life... a weblog about life, technology, and the Opera Web browser

Trond Werner Hansen, the man behind Opera's Quick UI, has started a journal. In his first post, he talks about 7.50 Preview 2 and beta testing. As one of the key developers on the Desktop team, he's got the information you want. Enjoy!

Beauty. Helen of Troy in causing the Trojan War was said to have had "the face that launched a thousand ships". Therefore a face beautiful enough to launch one ship would be 1 millihelen.

Alternative answers and thoughts:

• A millihelen is a face that can launch a single ship. I think the phrase was coined by Larry Niven. My life however has been full of women who could be measured in nanohelens, i.e. they could launch 2 lengths of deck planking and six rivets!
1 Helen (H) is a huge quantity of beauty, and is thus inconvenient to work with. The smaller unit, the milliHelen (mH), representing the amount of beauty required to launch a single ship is more workable. Even this has problems, since the amount of beauty required to cause the spontaneous launching of ships must be large, since verifiable instances of beauty-induced ship launching are not commonplace. Also, there is no explanation as to how beauty could be "used up" in launching ships in such a way as to allow the count of successful launches to be able to be related to the total beauty.
• Are there negative measurements (ugliness) and how are they measured? Spontaneous sinking of boats? Or the launching of submarines? With the reported problems of the Collins class submarines (a seriously ugly boat) probably resulting in extended times in dry-dock, their multiple launching could soak up a lot of ugliness in the world.
• Is there a factor that needs to be applied to different classes of vessels to account for size, displacement, crew, etc. e.g. does a Trimaran require 1mH, 3mH, or some other amount of beauty to spontaneously launch?

I've had this sitting around for a while. I hope you got a laugh out of it, Helen.

Sometimes I catch myself being mean to people. It's usually certain people that have irked me in a very insignificant way. In retaliation, I'm consistently belligerent toward them. I feel particularly un-Christ-like when I realize what I've been doing. Yet, I can't seem to get out of the habit of meanness toward them. I feel really bad about it. I don't set out to be malicious. I'm often given the opportunity to be perfectly polite and helpful or sarcastic and belittling. Far too often I take the latter route.

I've been trying to understand why I do this. Is it human nature? Is it competitiveness? Is it residual meanness from years of bad experiences growing up? Am I bullying the only people I feel I can? Does it matter? Whatever the case, the fact that I'm doing it is just wrong. I know better. I even feel bad when I'm doing it. I'm going to work on that.